show penalty/boost to puppy survival check - it doesn't work the way we think it works!

So, you know how your puppy has a survival bar that determines its chances of surviving vs dying on rollover?  And you know how puppies get penalties or boosts from whether they or the mom are fully fed/happy?

Apparently the penalties/boosts happen before the survival check!  Which means two things:

1. a puppy with a 100% survival bar can still die on that rollover if it's hungry and unhappy (it gets a 15% penalty, its survival becomes 85%, and then you have a 15% chance of death) - personally I think that is incredibly counterintuitive and scary, and it's pure luck that my puppies haven't died to this. (except one that probably did...)
2. a puppy with a 93% survival bar can actually be completely safe if it's fully fed and happy (it gets a 7% boost, bringing it up to 100% before the survival check) - this is great news for puppy survival but it'd be really good to know how this works, so I can stop worrying about 99% puppies and assigning unnecessary extra pupsitting to them!
   

My suggestion is to make it clearer how this works by showing it in the puppy survival bar. Right now it's intuitive to think that if the puppy has a 100% survival bar it'll definitely survive, and if it has 95% it might die - I have seen a lot of people say that, because that's what the values look like!  If the obvious way is not how it workrolls, then I think it should be made clear by showing the boosts/penalties in the survival bars before rollover. So, instead of "60% survival with 35% pupsitter protection" which shows up as a 95% survival bar, a puppy should have either "60% survival with 35% pupsitter protection and a 7% fed/happy boost" showing up as a 100% survival bar, or "60% survival with 35% pupsitter protection and a 15% hunger/mood penalty" showing up as an 80% survival bar, depending on what its current mood/hunger situation is (or zero boost/penalty if it's fed but not happy or vice versa). And this should change when you feed it or play with it (or the mom if it's unweaned), so that you can see what the actual chance of survival on rollover is.

Alternatively, the order could just be changed to make the survival check happen before the boosts/penalties, to make things work the way they look like they work (a 100% survival bar puppy always survives, a 93 survival bar puppy has a 7% chance of death, etc, and the penalties/boosts get applied after that so they only matter starting on the next rollover).  This would probably be easier to implement, but it'd mean fewer/later boosts, so I'd rather have the first solution.

Here are the screenshots of one of the admins explaining that this is how it works (taken from this thread):

So in effect the survival bar tells you what the chance of survival was last rollover, not what it will be next rollover.

I wasn't aware that it worked like this and agree that it's counter-intuitive. I wonder if a more elegant fix would simply be to swap the order in the rollover script, so that deaths are rolled first (based on the previous day's survival chance), then boosts/debuffs are applied.

If that is not something the staff want to do though, I definitely support your suggestion as an alternative.

On the other hand, it does also mean that if you fully fed/played with the mom/puppy and if it has 93% survival chance it is guaranteed to survive upon rollover, correct?

@ Sol Yes.

Yeah, for that reason I think it'd be better to keep it as it is and just make it clearer, because that way we get better pup survival advantages. But if that's not an option, I agree that swapping the order would be better than the current confusing situation.

I would personally vote for switching the order since that is the assumptions most people had (have). Admins have said there is no hidden survival boost aka the number on the pup is total (includes sitters) but that is not really true when boost/penalty rolls first and is not accounted in the number shown on the screen.

I added the order-switching option to the main post.  Making sure it's obvious how things work is definitely the most important factor, even if personally I'd like to get the earlier boosts as well.

And yeah, ouch, the "no hidden survival boost" thing is super misleading when the penalties/boosts happen first...

I agree with clarifying the system- I don't agree with switch the order, mostly because while it does seem counter-intuitive at first it means something pretty big: you can save a puppy in bad condition via the boost

Going to use my own experience here, I had an offer on a puppy accepted right before rollover and didn't get to look at it. It came into my pack with like, 50ish survival and then took the 15% hit too, leaving it at 30%. I got really lucky it survived that first check but then my pupsitters (who were all new) could only boost it to like 90%. Getting the survival boost first means that got upgraded before the check got ran. If it hadn't there would've been an another chance for it to die that I wouldn't have been able to do /anything/ about.

It should definitely be explained better- and I agree that a note about if the puppy is currently eligible for the boost or debuff would be great, especially since that means your looking at the care stats anyway. So yeah support for making it clearer how puppy survival but not for swapping when the checks are applied

@Lesbirds ouch!! Yeah, those situations where someone accepts a trade offer when you're already asleep and you can't protect the puppy before rollover are super scary, I had that happen too.  I think there's a suggestion around somewhere to give traded puppies immunity for one rollover, which I think should happen, to avoid this kind of thing.

I agree making it more clear would be helpful, but I don't really support switching it around. I'm glad to have this info though- I had no idea. Maybe it should be added to a quest so everyone gets a clear understanding of how it works. Basically though if you get to 100 before rollover, and everyone is fed and played with there would be no issue. This likely explains why I've seen some players say they know they were at 100%, but lost the pup. If they didn't play with them or Mom they could still die. Thanks for bringing this to everyone's attention.